Swedish Contemporary Fiction 1
Tone Schunnesson (b. 1988) Tone Schunnesson is on
e of the new leading lights of Swedish literature. In her two novels published so far, she strikes the perfect notes to convey a lost, anxious generation’s search for the meaning of life. Her books are like an MRI scan of an empty, selfobsessed contemporary milieu: searching, desire, and a lack of boundaries are everywhere you look. Her female protagonists dream of freedom and autonomy, but they have lost their foothold in life. They sink deeper into misery and desperation in an indifferent Stockholm. The narrator in Schunnesson’s debut novel Days and Days and Days 268 p. 2020, Norstedts Rights: Norstedts Agency Bibbs is just about to turn thirty-nine. Even though Bibbs lacks talent, she has been famous for a while. Now, though, the good life is beginning to slip through her fingers. And there seems to be a never-ending flow of unexpected expenditures. Like the rent. Trip Reports 169 p. 2016, Norstedts Rights: Norstedts Agency She is living on the edge all the time, using others and letting herself be used. She protects herself from her memories by never stopping drinking. Sometimes, though, she does sober up and then she wonders: Could there yet be someone that could save her? An uncompromising and poetic journey exploring a young woman’s mental state. Trip Reports (‘Tripprapporter’, 2016) is a young, lonely, unemployed woman who escapes a bleak environment in Stockholm and embarks on a boozeand drug-fuelled odyssey. She has nothing to be proud of, having stolen from her family and friends, manipulated and exploited those closest to her. She could be a little sister to 39-year-old Bibbs in Days and Days and Days (‘Dagarna, dagarna, dagarna’, 2020), a jaded, has-been influencer with too many bad debts piled up. Women authors have always written about how money rules the world and how it affects relationships between men and women. For the people in Tone Schunnesson’s novels, everything seems to be a transaction: people give and people take; nothing is given for free. Sometimes Schunnesson’s Marxist ideals come to the surface. Some of her characters choose destruction and social exclusion as an escape from society’s demands for productivity. ‘It’s bittersweet to choose to be unhappy and alone, because it gives me a sense of superiority […] isolation makes me an elite,’ says the narrator of Trip Reports. Tone Schunnesson writes without a seat belt. Her impressionistic high-speed prose is wild and unruly, veering from the poetic to the grotesque. She conjures up her none-too-sympathetic protagonists with real understanding and warmth. Her lethal humour lightens claustrophobic scenes from their lives, paradoxically making them even more affecting. Yukiko Duke Rights sold to: 4 countries Swedish Contemporary Fiction 16 Foto: Märta Thisner